Scholars Worry Conflicts Over Data Could Hamstring Future Research

A teacher supervises students at a Los Angeles school. The Los Angeles Times ' decision to link teachers to students' test scores has stirred a debate over privacy rights.

—Irfan Khan/Los Angeles Times/MCT

By Sarah D. Sparks

Never has there been more federal money or pressure for education scientists to partner with practitioners—from the U.S. Department of Education’s Investing in Innovation grants to the Institute of Education Sciences’ push for more classroom-level relevance in research.

Yet recent high-profile data-confidentiality fights in Arizona and Los Angeles have researchers worried that access to educators may become a difficult path.

At first glance, the two cases don’t appear to have much in common. In the course of a decadelong federal lawsuit over English-language-learner programs in Arizona, lawyers for state schools chief Tom Horne last month subpoenaed the raw data from three studies commissioned by the Civil Rights Project at the University of California, Los Angeles. In gathering the data, researchers from the University of Arizona, in Tucson, and Arizona State University, in Tempe, collected comments on teachers’ and administrators’ experiences with the ELL programs—some of them critical—and promised that the names of teachers, schools, and districts would be kept confidential. Some researchers protested the request, but Judge Raner C. Collins of the U.S. District Court in Tucson ruled on Aug. 19 that the names of schools and districts could be released, but not those...